History: The story of our farm

(Note: This story originally appeared as a two-part story in The Pine Knot newspaper in February 2021. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 on their website.)

We share in calling this place our home

– Part I –

In June of 2020, we turned off County Road 6, just east of Barnum, and onto the gravel driveway at the Johnson family farm. It may be our new home, but it will always be the Johnson farm.

We had just come from Moose Lake, where we had signed the closing papers. Ed Johnson had handed us several large sets of keys. We still aren’t sure what some of those keys open.

We parked, got out of the car and started to walk. Nothing needed to be said. My fiancé, Heather-Marie Bloom, and I knew where we were going.

Our destination was a grassy spot underneath a stand of box elder trees at the edge of a field. We sat down in the grass. We snapped a few pictures. It was a warm, June day. A light breeze was blowing. The sky was a collage of early summer blue with low, billowing clouds. Looking east, we saw rain fall from darker clouds like a bridal veil.

The grassy spot where we sat had been the family’s garden plot. Ruth Johnson, the last member of the family to live at the farm, had tended to the garden with help from her mother-in-law, Edna, and the rest of the family. They grew a variety of vegetables that they’d eat fresh in the summer and preserve and store for winter.

Directly in front of where we sat, the land gently slopes away before rising up again to another small knob that is the highest spot on the property. This was where Ed Johnson, Ruth’s husband for 63 years, had enjoyed walking with his daughter Sharon in the evenings, so they could have good views of the sunset. Later in life, when walking the distance became too much, he’d make the journey in a golf cart.

On the east side of this hill, water flows on a meandering journey toward Lake Superior. On the west side, the water makes its way through lakes and rivers, eventually joining the Mississippi.

We couldn’t help but wonder what this open, rolling landscape must have looked like before the Johnson family, before it was logged, before the railroad and before the Treaty of 1854 with the Ojibwe. We tried to imagine the ancient forests of towering white pine and the home to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

Walking history

The first day we visited the farm, Ed Johnson took us on a walk around the mile-long perimeter, talking about the land and the farm’s history.

We told him our story as well.

Rising Phoenix Community Farm is the name of the business that Heather-Marie started in 2011. She had been what she called a “landless farmer.” She would lease space to farm and move a tiny house that she and her father built to the property where she would grow vegetables for the members of her community-supported agriculture business.

After moving her business and her farm five times in 10 years, we decided in 2019 that it was time to to look for land of our own.

Ed told us that he and his sisters, Susan DaPra and Sharon Riemer, had decided it was finally time to sell the family farm after their mother, Ruth, died in 2018.

At the end of the visit, we thanked Ed and said we were looking at some other properties as well, but that we’d get back to him.

He paused for a moment and then said, softly, “I think you’d be real happy here.”

It had not always been an easy life, but for 114 years and four generations, Ed Johnson’s family had been happy on this land.

Settlers

The first member of the Johnson family to settle on this 40-acre parcel of land was not named Johnson. It was Simpson.

Edward and Abigail Simpson came to northern Minnesota from Ontario, Canada in the late 1800s. Their daughter, Edna, was born in 1899 in Gary New Duluth, where the family lived for a short time before moving down to Barnum.

In 1906, the Simpson family moved onto this land as homesteaders.

Edna Simpson would spend the rest of her life on the farm. In 1921, she married a man named Carl Johnson from Cloquet, who would join the family at the farm. The couple would go on to have two children, Edward, and Ethel – who lived for only 22 months before dying of septic poisoning.

After just five years of marriage, Carl died in 1926 after a year-long battle with tuberculosis and diabetes. Now in her late 20s, Edna and her 4-year-old son, Edward, were left to live on the farm with her parents.

Farm life

Edward grew up working on the farm, helping his namesake grandfather, who had cleared the land in the early 1900s using a team of horses and black powder for blasting.

“On the farm lived cattle, horses, chickens, pigs – typical of all self-sustaining farms,” wrote the younger Ed in a brief timeline documenting the history of the farm. “Crops included hay, corn and small grains such as oats.”

They also raised Guernsey cattle and were involved with the Barnum Breeders Association, Ed wrote.

Edward Simpson died in September of 1943. Abigail would die later that same year. They were both 82.

Now it was just Edna and Edward on the farm. Edward was in his early 20s. In 1949, he married Ruth Johnson – same last name, but no relation. When they had their first daughter, Susan, and then their son, Ed, they began construction on a larger home next to the one they were living in. They built it themselves in the evenings after Ed got home from work and the chores were done. The home was finished in 1954.

For the next 30 years, there would be three generations of the Johnson family living at the farm, and they all played a role in daily life there. The kitchen was Edna’s domain, though she also did childcare both at home and for others in the community. For a time, she also walked 2 miles into Barnum, where she worked at a restaurant.

Edward Johnson had numerous jobs off the farm to bring in extra income, including being head custodian for the schools in Barnum.

Ruth had worked for the Barnum Creamery before they were married, but now the duties of the farm and of milking the farm’s dairy cows were her main responsibilities.

The 1960s and 1970s were probably the most profitable times for the family farm, the younger Ed Johnson told me. The dairy cows were productive and brought in a fair amount of income, and there were three generations of Johnsons to help out with all the work that needed to be done.

This farm was not unlike many in the region. They were small and family-owned and gave people an income and a way of life, though it had to be supplemented with income from jobs off the farm.

Revival

Things began to change in the 1980s as local banks began to fold and many of the smaller farms began to go out of business, Ed told me. It wasn’t uncommon, he said, to have an auction at one farm or another nearly every week.

First the creamery in Barnum closed, and then the Moose Lake creamery closed in 1976.

Eventually, the Johnsons switched from dairy to beef cattle.

Edward Johnson died in 2013. Ruth would live in the home by herself until she moved to an assisted living facility. She died in 2018.

Susan DaPra told me that she thinks her mother and grandmother would be very pleased to know the Johnson family farm would soon be busy with activity from a new generation of farmers.

‘Welcome to your farm’

Heather-Marie and I eventually walked back to the house, unlocked the door and walked inside.

On the kitchen table we found a basket of fruit and, leaning against it, a picture. It was the entire Johnson family, taken in the living room of the home when Edward and Ruth were still alive.

At the bottom of the photo was a note: “Welcome to your farm. The Johnson family.”

Past is prologue in new farm formation

– Part II –

With our farm’s first growing season fast approaching, a century-old picture on the living room wall inspires us.

The image is cloudy and faded at the edges. The faces of the people are blurry. We don’t know a lot about the photo except that it’s from about 1915 and that two of the people are Ed and Abigail Simpson, who first homesteaded the farm in 1906.

The image shows a family and all of their livestock: A team of tall, white horses; five cows and a flock of chickens pecking away in the background.

When we were first handed this image by the farm’s descendants, my fiancee, Heather-Marie Bloom, and I both thought the same thing: We wished we could have a conversation with these people.

We tried to envision how that would go.

We’d tell them that Heather-Marie first started farming a decade ago, leasing land, before we finally purchased this farm just east of Barnum – their farm – after placing an advertisement in the newspaper that was read by their descendants, the Johnson family.

We would explain that Heather-Marie’s farm, called Rising Phoenix Community Farm, uses techniques that reject the large-scale, highly mechanized approaches that have dominated modern agriculture for the past 50 years.

She also doesn’t have a tractor and doesn’t plan on getting one. She will not use any chemically derived pesticides or fertilizers.

And, we’d explain, she sells her vegetables through a “community supported agriculture” (CSA): a small group of customers sign up and pay her at the start of the season. In return, she agrees to deliver a weekly box of vegetables over the 17-week growing season.

What do you think, Ed and Abigail?

Perhaps their response would be similar to one she heard from family and friends when she first told them of this dream more than a decade ago: Why would you want to do that?

In fact, the model of Rising Phoenix Community Farm is not unique. In Carlton County – as is the case across the United States – a new wave of agriculture is combining old approaches and new innovation to farm on a smaller scale, selling directly to customers.

In 1906, when Ed and Abigail Simpson moved onto this land, they faced the daunting task of transforming a once-forested landscape into farmland. Where there had been a virgin forest of white pines, there were now rolling hills covered with tree stumps and rocks.

The only tools at their disposal were a team of horses, a plow and black powder. The remnants of their work are still visible on the eastern edge of the now-cleared fields where piles of moss- and lichen-covered rocks lie.

Ed Johnson, the great-grandson of Ed and Abigail, said tractors were not used on the farm until sometime in the 1940s. Johnson said no chemical fertilizers were ever used on the farm. They relied on their livestock’s manure to keep the soil fertile.

Here we go

For CSA farmers in this region, March is a busy time of year. Some are still taking registrations from prospective members, though many are nearing full capacity.

The seeds have been ordered. Greenhouses are heating up and seeds will soon begin to germinate as they are coaxed to life.

For Heather-Marie, this year will be different. After 10 years of leasing land she is planting seeds on her own farm.

Rising Phoenix uses farming techniques that most likely aren’t too different from what Ed and Abigail did on this same land.

We limit the use of tractors and focus not just on growing vegetables, but on growing our soil. We will feed it a balanced diet of compost, manure and other amendments in hopes it feeds us and our customers for years to come.

But growing vegetables is only part of the job. There is a reason Heather-Marie has the word “community” in the name of her farm. For her, the idea is to do more than run a business; it’s to connect people to their food, to their farmer and to one another.

In the past 10 years, Heather-Marie has developed an intimate relationship with her customers. Many of her members have been with her from the first year. Rising Phoenix is one of the few CSAs in this region that offers a discount if members work a set number of hours on the farm.

Hybrid practices

Last summer, we invited longtime farmer David Abazs out to walk the land with us. David and his wife, Lise, moved to northern Minnesota in 1988 and started homesteading on 40 acres near Finland and named it Round River Farm, one of the first organic CSA farms in this region.

Abazs told me recently that the most innovative and successful farms draw on both old and new ways of farming.

“Think about the fact that everything grown before the 1940s was organic,” said Abazs, who is also executive director of the University of Minnesota Extension Northeast Regional Sustainable Development Partnership.

The farms were small, they had livestock, and they used local labor. They also rotated crops and fertilized with manure.

But modern farms also have the opportunity to experiment with new innovative techniques, including soil testing, solar energy and equipment that cultivates crops without damaging the soil.

“New farms need to make decisions about ways to innovate,” he said. “The farms of the future are farms that are going to consider all these aspects.”

Abazs said one of the greatest challenges facing today’s small farms is a global food system that gives consumers tomatoes in winter (never mind how they taste), and food that is far cheaper than an organic farmer can afford to sell it for.

The success of CSAs in this region suggests consumers may be willing to pay a little more for food grown for them by a farmer who is also their neighbor.

In 2017, Carlton County had 529 farms with a median size of 127 acres producing agricultural products that earned an average of $27,766 per farm, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture farm census. That’s up slightly from 2012 when 501 farms reported earning an average of $21,877.

Rising Phoenix is one of a dozen CSAs in this region that belong to the CSA Guild. Collectively, these farms in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin have more than 800 members who sign up to receive weekly deliveries of vegetables during the summer. Those farms range in size from small ones like Rising Phoenix and Stone’s Throw Farm in Wrenshall to larger operations like Northern Harvest Farm and Food Farm, also in Wrenshall, that have hundreds of CSA members and provide food to their customers for much of the year.

Last year, most of those farms had waiting lists of people hoping to join. This year, the trend is heading in the same direction and many farmers believe the pandemic has people rethinking where their food is coming from.

It’s on

One night as the sun set and the frigid, subzero wind blew, we put on a few layers and walked out across the crusty snow toward the field, hidden beneath a foot of crusty snow.

CSA membership signup had begun and it all suddenly began to feel real.

The way a CSA works is that people sign up and pay in advance. On the registration form, they check a box that certifies they know this arrangement is a “shared risk.”

That means we could do everything right and it could still all go wrong. Too much rain. Too little rain. Pests, disasters. The possibilities are endless.

We stared out across the field quietly wishing that Ed and Abigail were here to give us a little advice. Or, if nothing else, at least a little encouragement.

Writer John Hatcher teaches journalism at the University of Minnesota Duluth and spends his summer helping his fiancée, Heather-Marie Bloom, grow vegetables for her business, Rising Phoenix Community Farm.